Is It "Ark Week"?

What is going on? I just posted a story about a guy who built an ark, and now I’m reading that Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) is building one too!

Aronofsky and Noah go way back. When the writer-director was 13, he won a United Nations competition at his school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn; it was for his first poem, a little effort about the end of the world as seen through Noah’s eyes. “That story has interested me ever since,” he says, squinting through his yellow-tinted shades and pulling a striped woolly hat on to his head. We are on the decking in front of his hotel, with the snow-dusted mountains spread out before us. Henry, Aronofsky and Weisz’s 10-month-old son has just been whisked off on a sightseeing trip with his nanny, and all is tranquil.

The script, Aronofsky tells me, is no conventional biblical epic. “Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk,” he says admiringly. “It’s there in the Bible – it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor’s guilt going on there. He’s a dark, complicated character.”